AMD’s new Tonga GPU to get Released in August

In an attempt to secure success against its competition, AMD is pulling out all the stops with its latest GPU. With its new chip, codenamed Tonga, AMD looks to take out Nvidia’s Maxwell-based GM107 GPU chip. Although many details on the product remain sketchy at best, and specifications aren’t available, reporters have speculated themselves to death.

Many believe that this new piece will serve as a direct replacement to Tahiti Pro products. Tahiti was a pretty hefty design in comparison, however, and Tonga is looking to maximize efficiency at a smaller size.

The Chinese version of VR-Zone reported that the device will launch in August of 2014. News sources predict that the chip will come in both a 2GB and 4GB model of its GDDR5 memory. Both versions are expected to have 2048 GCN 2.0 cores, 32 ROPs, 128 TMUs, and a 256-bit memory bus.

Competitor Nvidia released their Maxwell cards earlier in the year to offer solid performance on 1080p gaming. The AMD Tonga chip is expected to offer a greater power efficiency for gamers, and address the power gap of Maxwell chips.

This new Tonga chip will serve to replace the Tahiti Pro GPU in Radeon R9 280 and R9 280X cards in their coming distributions. The R9 280 model is currently available for $299, but it is unknown if the updated Tonga card will change its price.

We can expect to see a price war between AMD and Nvidia in the coming months as they battle it out to secure the market.